With perfect back to school timing the trio of Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell and Kathryn Hahn rock up to the multiplexes and force their target market to take a long, hard look at their own parenting skills - and then hopefully give themselves a pat on the back.
Some have described Bad Moms as a female Hangover - it's written and directed by the duo who penned that comedy classic - but that's a bit wide of the mark. Yes, it's got plenty of the same sex-and-swearing shenanigans, but it has a much bigger heart and - gasp! - a message.
Kunis plays Amy, the superwoman who's mother to two children, and a husband. She works a full-time-part-time office job, comes up with amazing breakfasts, lunches and dinners, does the homework and cries at least once a day in her car because she feels "like the worst mom in the world". You know Amy; maybe she's you.
When Amy discovers that the manchild in her life is having an online affair she boots him out and tries to go on like nothing has happened. Thankfully, that doesn't last long and as she starts to scratch her head and wonder just what she's doing on the hamster wheel of perfection, she befriends stay-at-home mother of four Kiki (Bell) and stay-out-all-night single parent Carla (Hahn). With their help she begins to embrace life in all its ragged glory and live a little. Oddly enough, the kids find their own way to the fridge.
Of course, this freewheeling attitude to bake sales, after-class meetings and all the other time and money pits in maternal life doesn't go down well with everyone, in particular Gwendolyn (Christina Applegate), the Parent Teacher Association boss and mother of the unseen Blair and Gandhi. She's determined to get Amy back on the 'right' track, but Amy is too far gone down the road of real life to turn around. That's the set-up, cue the slapstick and snarkiness.
Writer-directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore have cast their movie perfectly and there's a wonderful energy between Kunis, Bell and Hahn as the three kindred spirits who've decided that enough is enough and Applegate as their nemesis - TV show heaven if someone could find a way. There are plenty of quality one-liners ("Kent and I have sex every Friday night after Blue Bloods", "I feel that everything that comes out of your mouth is a cry for help", "Tessa took two weeks off when Jon Snow died in Game of Thrones") and unlike the majority of its male competition, Bad Moms doesn't use up all the best stuff inside the first half-hour. Even with an over-reliance on music-driven montages, it's funnier than the Bad Neighbours movies and the Hangover sequels put together.
That's the fun stuff, but Bad Moms has a point to make about how judgement (internal and external) is reached so quickly and harshly these days - exactly when did 'good enough' become 'not good enough'? "We're killing ourselves trying to be perfect and it's making us insane," Kunis says as she tries to get her put-upon peers to come around to a new way of thinking. Crucially, this soul-searching doesn't feel like it was just shoe-horned into the script at the last minute and the resolution is retch-free. There may well be tears in the eyes, and not just from laughter.
Make sure to hang around for the closing credits sequence, because it's all about real-life superheroes.
Harry Guerin
